


syntaxone.txt

by negativecosine



Series: the AU where they're linguists [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Drug Use, Gen, Humanstuck, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Underage Drinking, inadvisable syntax, shameless pale porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 04:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/pseuds/negativecosine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamzee is not Karkat's student. But, you know. It's hard to turn away a kid with syntax trees that decent wrapped in writing that awful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	syntaxone.txt

**Author's Note:**

> This really only makes sense in the, uh, """"linguistics AU"""" that I'm apparently writing, and takes place a good year or so before the other stories, but there's no set order they need to be read in.

"Are you fucking serious," Karkat says, when this stoner freshman dumps a huge sheef of graph paper and blue ink on his designated cafe table. "Do you even own a fucking computer, no, shut up, I know you do, and stop sending me farmville requests or I will block you and also behead you. No, I'm not reading this, get out." 

Gamzee - this fucking stoner freshman, who literally owns a bong bigger than Karkat - instead puts two coffees down on the table in front of Karkat, on top of the pile of paper he's just put there, and moves Karkat's shitty backpack off the spare chair so he can sit in it. He perches both his feet on the chair, so he looks like a large bird, and grins dopily at Karkat. His whole face is so lazy-slack and he stinks of weed and greasepaint and hair that is seriously not going to dread properly without some concerted attention, but the whole olfactory attack is blocked by the gorgeous scent of black coffee. "Thought you might be needing two, brother," Gamzee tells him, and Karkat is briefly overtaken by the urge to cry and kiss him on his gross mouth, "on account of that bitchtits wicked assignment your righteous sister was all telling me about." 

Of course Terezi, in her infinite quest to make Karkat look like a slacker, is an assistant grader for Syntax One. And of course she gossips with the students, because she's an undergrad too and there's really no official fraternization rules about it at that level. And of course she's probably sent Gamzee to bother Karkat specifically to slow Karkat down on the Icelandic bet. What she doesn't know is that he is seriously not even working on the Icelandic because fuck these psycho games that the girls keep playing, and he will stick to _normal_ morphology issues, like _Latin_ , and _fuck off forever_ with quirky subjects. 

But he's still got to deal with this fucking stoner freshman, who is clearly better at bribes than expected. Karkat scowls and sucks down one full cup of the coffee - oh god it is _scalding_ and it is _disgustingly_ sweet and black and strong and Karkat is seriously going to take this fucking freshman out behind the Science Library and defresh him. They maintain eye-contact like that, Gamzee vacant and unfocused, and Karkat glaring and trying not to make any overtly sexual noises into his coffee, until the second-cup is half-drained. Finally, he moves the cups aside (ignoring the ring he's stained into the top page of Gamzee's... thing) and shuffles the scraps into something that could feasibly resemble a syntax paper. 

"Okay, first," he says, and oh god the caffeine is hitting him hard, he is talking way too loud, he doesn't care, "Where the fuck is your data." 

***

Two hours later, the cafe kicks them out. Karkat pitches a bit of a fit, because what the fuck kind of cafe closes at six in a college town, do they hate money, are they stupid, what. Gamzee just sort of heaps everything into a roundish pile in the middle of the table, then slides it into Karkat's backpack and shoulders it, then wraps a hand around Karkat's elbow. Karkat hushes, unused to being touched, and mostly too flabbergasted that this stoner fucking freshman would even try a thing like this to muster up the appropriate offense. He lets himself be led out, and stares blankly at Gamzee in the gray evening light outside. He opens his mouth to say something along the lines of 'give me my shit you fucking weirdo,' but it sort of comes out more like "Come on, we can finish at my place." 

Karkat's place is about the same size as a dorm room, in an apartment building populated almost entirely by students. The only real advantage is that it's closer to the bars, and he can live on his own, which is far, far preferable to the arrangements he had last year in the actual campus housing. It's only about five minutes to walk from the cafe, and Gamzee is blessedly quiet throughout. He seems a little dazed in the twilight, and gets completely sidetracked for a minute by a bucket drum circle on the corner of the alley. Karkat has to tug at him to get him moving again, and Gamzee stumbles a little before kicking back into motion. His legs are so long that Karkat has to sort of jog to keep up when Gamzee's going at a decent clip, but he's eager to- 

-wait. 

-what exactly is he eager to do, here? Get home, sure, he's eager to get out of public because he hates going out where he feels like he's always being watched, being sneered at and gossipped about, but that's not any more pressing right now than it usually is. He's not _actually_ eager to jump this freshman's bones, he's pretty sure. If the paint and the shitty syntax weren't offputting enough, the weed and the hair would surely do it. But he wants Gamzee to come over, he wants to get him alone, and, what. 

Do syntax, mostly. 

Gamzee's syntax is bad in the way that everyone's syntax is bad in Syntax One. Syntax One is boot camp, it's survive-or-get-out, it's the weed-out class. It's got no prerequisites, so any asshole can enroll, but it's got three five-to-seven-page papers a week, no textbook, and the expectation is basically "Invent something that works or get out of linguistics forever you terrible motherfucker." Gamzee's doing mostly what all linguists do, which is sort of just beating at the data blindly until inspiration strikes. 'Inspiration' for Gamzee appears to be a bit more of a classical idea- at one point in the cafe he literally made reference to a syntax messiah, but Karkat's giving it a miss because the stupid-ass solutions that he's come up with are not actually that stupid. 

He can't write for shit, of course, which is the other problem that usually makes people drop the major. That's easier to fix, though. Karkat's already dragged Gamzee by the ear through about three pages of his own shit, forcing him to scrawl leaky red ink over his own precious graph paper, throwing out a truly astounding number of "basically it's like" and "all up and," and in one case an actual "motherfuckin," just sitting there innocently on the page. 

(It was in this sentence: "Well since a noun phrase can't be in two motherfuckin places at once and be meanin the same thing and be only sayin it once we got address this paradox.") 

Editing is no harder in Karkat's apartment, but Gamzee does get a little distracted with all the syntax trees scrawled on butcher paper and dry-erase markers on the windows, mirror, and fridge. Karkat isn't worried about spoiling Gamzee for things he shouldn't know yet- the trees he's working on are going to be basically incomprehensible, since Gamzee has apparently not invented CPs or DPs yet, and is straight-up putting determiners on nouns like adjuncts. It's a little disgusting, but Karkat has no desire to fix Gamzee's nominal problems until Gamzee is actually assigned any nominal problems; his time will come, and Karkat finds he sort of relishes reading the first draft of _that_ paper, too. 

To focus him, Karkat installs Gamzee in front of the clunky desktop that's taking up half the studio apartment, shows him the tree-making software and a word-processor, and goes to open some cheap wine. When he gets back, he finds that Gamzee has found yet more scrap paper, and laid it out over the keyboard to scratch at. The pressure through the paper is typing gibberish into - what is that, is he literally writing this shit in _Notepad_ , he has titled it _syntaxone.txt_ and it makes Karkat go all fuzzy and soft around the grossest parts of his soul. He takes a swig from the wine bottle, and leaves Gamzee to it to go find some cups that are clean and maybe are not coffee mugs. 

It takes a while, but he finds plastic cups without having to actually (godforbid) wash anything, and hands Gamzee a scandously full cup before leaning in close over his shoulder to see what he's written. 

"Can't be up and makin these brackety little brothers behavin less I can see some fine branches and leaves outside my thinkpan," Gamzee says, taking the cup and shuffling the remaining scrap paper away. The brackety little brothers do indeed seem to be mostly behaving, and Gamzee's answer to English WH-movement is pretty adorable, now that Karkat can actually fucking read it. He takes a big gulp of his own wine, fast so he doesn't have to taste it too much, and perches on the bar on the back of the shitty metal folding chair so he can get up high enough over Gamzee to see properly. He can feel his warmth here, through his ratty teeshirt, and his godawful stink is sort of okay when compared with the taste of the godawful wine in his mouth. 

"Did you need my help with the actual assignment," Karkat says, and is a little surprised with how quiet he sounds, "Or just the part where you have to be literate to pass a college class?" 

"Your sermons n teachings are mighty appreciated, brother," Gamzee tells him instead. "Got me the holy light all up in, and no way to get at knowing the holy writings what'll tell me about it." 

"Where the fuck are you from?" Karkat can't stop himself from asking. It's the relativizing 'what' that finally cracks him, it's not in any urban vernaculars he knows in any Englishes, not with vowels like that, and it's going to drive him fucking crazy if he doesn't at least ask. 

"The sea," Gamzee says, "A church by the sea." 

"Not East Coast." Karkat wants to push- this 'holy light' stuff is edging around Serious Warning Signs, if the weed and the paint weren't already. "Not Appalachian. Not California. Canada? Really... weird Canada?" 

Gamzee swings around in the chair to look at him instead of staring at his .txt. It's a weird, loose-jointed motion, like a badly-manipulated puppet, and his legs are so long that Karkat's in serious danger of wine spillage when Gamzee swings one knee over to straddle the chair backwards. Gamzee's somehow drained his own cup without Karkat noticing, and he's dangling the cup from two fingers, lazy. He makes everything look lazy. Karkat's still standing up on the bar of the chair, and he's right at eye level with Gamzee, and, wow, really close to his face, and he can see where the wine's stained the paint a little purple. 

"You've got a little-" Karkat has no idea what he's fucking doing, is he drunk already, what the fuck is this, but he's transferring his wine and his balance to one side and tugging his too-long sleeve over the knuckle of his thumb and reaching up to get the smudge. He feels like he's in a trance, like a contact high, like how he gets after three all-nighters and someone cuts him off from the coffee, like how he gets in semantics classes, like the universe is going to all cram itself into his brain and if he doesn't relax his skull it'll explode. 

"Weird Canada," Gamzee says, right when Karkat's sleeve makes contact. The motion of his mouth wipes a big smear of gray and catches his teeth on Karkat's thumb and Karkat makes a noise sort of like he is dead from having a not-horrible emotion for the first time in his life. "Canada's all weird," he continues, and Karkat desperately just wants to shove his thumb, sleeve, hand, entire body in Gamzee's mouth to figure out why he talks like that. "Times I been up that lovely way, anyway, maybe they only get weird when they hear I'm set to comin up." He doesn't flinch, doesn't react at all to Karkat's hand, except to flick his eyes down and then up. 

"You're not my student," Karkat says, slowly, carefully. 

"Ain't no one's student just by bein that way." Gamzee tilts his chin up by an almost undetectable degree, except that it pushes his bottom lip against Karkat's knuckles. 

"You don't have anywhere to be tonight," Karkat says, and he really wants to either chug the rest of his wine or throw it down the sink, but he also really really doesn't want to move right now. 

"Got somewhere to be, just don't know where it is yet." Gamzee's eyes are sharp now, brighter, and it's fucking weird, seeing such intense focus from his slack face. 

"And tomorrow morning."

"Not down to be gettin all wriggly with you just yet, my brother," Gamzee says, all soft and unassuming and Karkat feels like maybe he is going to die from not knowing how to have emotions that aren't 1.) Bile, 2.) Syntax, 3.) Betrayal. Are there emotions that aren't these things? Do those exist? He does not know. Maybe this is something else. 

"Not that," Karkat says quickly, though he's quite sure Gamzee won't bolt from the guilt of rejecting him. He's quite sure Gamzee won't bolt. "Just-" 

Gamzee's eyes are terrifying and keen. "I got yearnin in me to know," he says, "And I got equal yearnin in me to not be askin. And I got a strong notion you know what kinda yearns they are." 

"You are going to do syntax until you die or kill me," Karkat promises, and unfolds his hand, carefully, slowly, wraps it onto Gamzee's painty cheek. It feels tacky and warm under his hand and Karkat wants to wash the kid's face and hair and scrub him down raw to see what's under there. 

"Won't be stoppin ever then." 

"Get," says Karkat, crisply as he can when he can feel this asshole's pulse through his skin, "In my bed. No, don't, get in my shower, and then get in my bed. I promise-" he adds quickly, at a flicker of doubt across Gamzee's face, "that there will be no wriggling. Only syntax." 

***

Three days later, Gamzee hasn't left. Well, no, that is a lie. He's gone to classes, he's gone to his dorm for clean (dubiously so) clothes and a toothbrush and more graph paper because Karkat doesn't have the big quadriles like he likes. He goes to the meadow to get high and goes to the bars with his fake ID and his sophomore friends and he goes to the library to download really awful music because Karkat's connection is too slow. But for the past three nights, he keeps ending up at Karkat's, claiming syntax problems. 

It's not that the syntax problems are a ruse, either. They are legitimate and beastly problems. It's just that... well. Gamzee can cook.


End file.
